Tuesday, 11 September 2012

Dancing Colours - perhaps a new version?

'Dancing Colours' was commissioned by my cousin, Brian, and his wife Carol as a retirement treat and designed to reflect their passion for British Morris dance, as well as rapper sword and longsword. It was finished for the 21st Plough Tour (a sword dance event on the first weekend in January) in 2007, so I never blogged about making it as it predates the blog. Here's some photos from the 2009 Plough tour, in case you are wondering what it's about. You can see Brian in front of the quilt here, which gives you an idea of scale. The centre is a life-sized longsword lock - the strips for the swords are one inch wide.

It was a complicated piece to make, including English paper piecing (centre), twisted Log Cabin foundation pieced onto paper (the triangle point infills), foundation piecing onto wadding (batting) & calico (colour strip background corners) and the whole thing was put together as quilt-as-you-go, with the swords being part of the joining strips. The colours are the colours of all the different dance sides or teams. The border is made from Harris Tweed, too thick to have wadding.

I didn't think anyone else would want to attempt this design, but I had an e mail last week from Marieke who would like to make it, and asked if I have a pattern - I'm sorry, I don't. But I have photos of the quilt in progress, so I will be posting a series of blog posts next week showing how it was done. Keep checking the blog for progress!